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Poll: How many Mythic achievements have you unlocked on Xbox?
Now that we're tracking Xbox's new platinum rival, for this week's poll, we want to know: how many Mythic achievements have you unlocked on Xbox?
Real Madrid, Barcelona and Liverpool still tracking Dortmund star
Nico Schlotterbeck was heavily linked with a move away from Borussia Dortmund earlier this year.He eventually signed a new contract with BVB until 2031, but that did little to end the speculation, wit...
Publication is not the finish line for open science
Tracking of open science must look at wider cycle, say Christopher Erdmann and Eleonora Colangelo
Prime Day Offers Best TV Prices of the Year From Samsung, Sony, and More
Prime Big Deal Days is in full swing this week, offering massive savings on everything from AirPods to MacBook Pro and much more. We've been keeping an eye on these Apple-related Prime Day discounts all week, but now we're also tracking great sales on other categories, including TVs. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.
Antigravity's Follow Me Bundle Adds Accurate Tracking And Gesture Controls To Its A1 Drone
Antigravity's watch and ring remote are available as an accessory bundle or as a full kit with the A1 drone.
Cal AI's 19-year-old founder just raised $10M for his new AI startup
Zach Yadegari, the teen co-founder of popular Cal AI calorie tracking app, has launched a new personal AI agent startup that competes with Instinct, Muse and Bee.
Amazon Launches Early Prime Day Discounts on AirPods, iPad, MacBook Air, and More
Earlier this week, we began tracking early Prime Day deals on Apple-related accessories, and today Amazon has introduced major early deals on Apple products as well. This includes AirPods, iPads, MacBooks, and more, all available at some of the lowest prices of the year so far. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.
Alabama vs. Georgia live score, updates, highlights from 2026 SEC rivalry game
The Sporting News is tracking live scores, updates and highlights from Alabama vs. Georgia in Tuscaloosa. Here's the full updates from this SEC rivalry.
Chesapeake Bay gets best overall health score in 40 years; Researchers say restoration paying off
The overall health of the Chesapeake Bay improved to its highest score in 40 years of tracking.
Opinion: How politics and policy are rewriting the rules of parcel delivery
By Daniil DavydoffFollowing the U.S. parcel delivery market can feel like tracking a race. Tactical moves to increase network capacity, build facilities, and launch tools, as well as strategic changes in leadership and operating models, dominate assessments of which carriers are gaining or losing ground, but political and policy forces are shaping those decisions. Labor […] The post Opinion: How politics and policy are rewriting the rules of parcel delivery appeared first on FreightWaves.
PEN America: Nearly 12,000 school book bans in a year, a record high
A new study from PEN America reveals that there were nearly 12,000 book bans in public schools over the past year, the highest since tracking began five years ago | Talk 1370
Kentucky health officials urge vaccination amid worst measles outbreak in years
Kentucky health officials are tracking 157 confirmed measles cases statewide, including 56 in Laurel County, and urging vaccination to slow the outbreak.
Does opting out of smart TV tracking work? Research finds “suspicious” traffic.
OS operators throwing out that data is "unlikely," research author tells Ars.
Apple Pre-Orders Kick Off With First Discounts on HomeView and Apple TV 4K
Pre-orders are now live on Apple's newest devices, including the HomeView and Apple TV 4K, and Amazon has the first-ever discounts on these devices. We're also tracking great deals on MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and Apple Watch SE 3 in this week's best Apple deals. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.
Tracking health misinformation helps pediatricians provide targeted patient education
Pediatric clinicians can learn useful information by tracking the health misinformation that their patients encounter, according to research presented during the American Academy of Pediatrics 2026 National Conference & Exhibition Oct. 2-6, 2026, at the San Diego Convention Center.
People are using AI to make their smart TVs dumb again
Fed up with ads, tracking and sluggish interfaces, some smart TV owners are turning to AI agents to strip away bloatware and take back control of their TVs.
Tracking Mississippi’s Senate Race: Democratic Nominee Scott Colom and GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith
Apple Watch Prime Day Deals Arrive With New All-Time Low Prices for Series 12 and Ultra 4
Big Apple Watch discounts have started arriving ahead of Prime Big Deal Days, including new low prices on Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4. These deals join some Apple Watch SE 3 discounts that we began tracking over the weekend, alongside other major early Prime Big Deal Days markdowns. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.
Pixel Watch is getting blood pressure tracking and new health tools this week
Pixel Watch users get major health tracking upgrades, but Fitbit Air owners will have to pay.
KOFST President: Nation Respecting Scientists Key to AI Top 3
KOFST President: Nation Respecting Scientists Key to AI Top 3 60th anniversary marks new AI award, expanded scientist honors, policy tracking for youth and national strategy
Apple's Health Age Test Doesn't Hold Back (Oof)
We test Apple's updated Health app tools in iOS 27.2 to evaluate fitness tracking metrics and age assessment accuracy.
Garmin Approach S72 connects golf performance with health tracking
Starting at $799.99, the S72 pairs swing metrics and green-reading tools with sleep, stress and heart-rate tracking for health-minded golfers.
PEN America: Nearly 12,000 school book bans in a year, a record high
A new study from PEN America reveals that there were nearly 12,000 book bans in public schools over the past year, the highest since tracking began five years ago.
Apple Watch Ultra 4 Review: Still the Best Health Buddy for Your Wrist
The fourth-gen Apple Watch Ultra doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it sure does pack plenty of upgrades, like more accurate health tracking and longer battery life.
Findings from the EHF Texas Health Tracking Poll 2025
The annual EHF Texas Health Tracking Poll 2025 also shows how health care affordability, food insecurity, and health are closely connected. Food-insecure Texans are more than 4.5 times as likely to have medical bill problems as those who are food secure, and health outcomes steadily worsen as food security decreases. Texans who regularly run short...
The safest and easiest way to debloat Windows 11
Don't put up with the clutter in Windows 11 — you can remove the most annoying pre-installed apps and tracking junk without much hassle.
How Brazilian Scientists Are Revealing The Hidden Threats Facing Sharks
Along Brazil’s coast, the EcoShark project is studying sharks from multiple angles, from satellite tracking and genetics to contaminants, diet and health.
PEN America: Nearly 12,000 school book bans in a year, a record high
A new study from PEN America reveals that there were nearly 12,000 book bans in public schools over the past year, the highest since tracking began five years ago | KNSS Radio
Newcastle eye highly-rated Morocco international Abdelhamid Ait Boudlal
The Magpies are tracking Rennes’ breakout defensive star as they plot a long-term backline overhaul, facing stiff competition for the imposing Mohammed VI Academy graduate.
NASA Satellites Observe Historic 2026 El Niño
A phenomenon rarer than a solar eclipse and more powerful than any single storm system is unfolding this fall, and NASA is tracking it closely.
People Are Vibe Coding the Ads Out of Their Smart TVs: Here's How
A viral Claude Code prompt lets Android smart TV owners switch off sponsored rows and tracking software and build their own home screens.
Ipsos Health Service Report 2026
Since 2018, Ipsos has been tracking perceptions of the quality of healthcare systems, the biggest health issues and the biggest public health problems.
Apple explains new Safari ad tracking privacy restrictions
Apple's latest privacy crackdown is rattling the online ad industry. And it isn't backing down.
Poll: Cost of Health Care and Gas Top Voters' Midterm Concerns; Democrats Hold Significant Advantage on Health Care Costs and Cost of Living
Just a month away from the midterm elections, affordability worries continue to top the public’s list of midterm election issues, with health care costs and gas costs tying as the top economic concern, KFF’s new Health Tracking Poll finds. Voters overall trust Democrats more than Republicans to handle the cost of health care and the cost of living.
TempraMed Announces VIVI Cap Smart Connectivity with Apple Health and Google Fit, Providing Better Health Outcomes and Data Tracking
VIVI Cap Smart transforms injectable medication protection into a connected health-data layer, enabling patients, caregivers and digital-health platforms to capture medication-use, temperature and adherence signals.Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - October 5, 2026) - TempraMed Technologies Ltd. (CSE: VIVI) (OTCQB: TMPTF) (FSE: 9DY) ("TempraMed" or the "Company"), a medical technology company transforming the storage, protection and management of temperature-sensitive medications, is pleased to
Why tracking business expenses matters — and how to get started
QuickBooks Free can help small business owners understand their cash flow, prepare for tax season and make informed spending decisions.
How citizen science is tracking changes in shorelines around the world
An app and a camera phone are all that’s needed at more than 200 spots to help researchers monitor coastal areas
How Data Lawsuit Settlement Will Impact CVS Health Stock Investors
CVS Health recently agreed to a US$20.5 million settlement over allegations that its website shared personal and protected health information with ad tech firm Criteo without user consent, resolving a data tracking dispute that had raised privacy and compliance questions. The legal resolution lands at the same time CVS Health is working with improved full year guidance, stronger cash generation and better Aetna medical benefit ratios. Together, these factors sharpen attention on how...
Pa. Health Department reverses course on new disease-tracking guidance, for now
Pennsylvania’s Department of Health has rescinded a 502-page proposal that could’ve given the agency more control over how it tracks and investigates the spread of diseases — and that spelled out the measures officials can take in response.
October Prime Day 2026: The Amazon early deals we're tracking from Hanes, DeWalt, Apple and more ahead of Prime Big Deal Days
We have the scoop on top pre-Prime Day discounts ahead of the October savings event, including tech must-haves, vacuums, fall style upgrades and more.
Strawberries in February: The Cyclospora outbreak and the cost of convenience
The 2026 outbreak reveals strains on farmworkers, food inspections and disease tracking in a system where consumers demand fresh produce year-round.
KFF Tracking Poll on Health Information and Trust: Fall 2026 Update on Vaccine Views
The latest KFF Tracking Poll on Health Information and Trust finds about half of parents mistakenly believe spacing out vaccines is healthier for children, while confidence in many long-standing childhood vaccines is high across partisans. These findings take on new relevance following President Trump's recent executive order calling for changes in U.S. childhood vaccine recommendations, including splitting the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine—currently given as a single combined shot—into three separate vaccines across multiple visits.
PEN America: Nearly 12,000 school book bans in a year, a record high
A new study from PEN America reveals that there were nearly 12,000 book bans in public schools over the past year, the highest since tracking began five years ago | Talk Radio 1210 WPHT
How Tasso+ became a new obsession for testosterone-tracking biohackers
Biohackers are embracing Tasso+, a button that draws blood without a needle and measures testosterone, as the market for DIY health tracking grows.
Trail Blazers Should Make Deflections a Public Standard
Portland’s defensive identity hinges on disruptive activity. By tracking deflections, Micah Nori can reward the hustle that rattles opponents, fuels transition opportunities, and proves winning begins off-ball.
Drones, satellites and AI help scientists watch over Antarctica's smallest lifeforms
Monitoring Antarctica's tiny, scattered ecosystems is a challenge that has long plagued researchers. But a new study led by the University of Wollongong (UOW) offers a new approach to tracking life in ...
Scientists discover that male and female skin play by different rules
Scientists have uncovered a surprising difference in how male and female skin repairs and renews itself. By tracking individual skin stem cells in living mice for five months, researchers discovered that female cells work together in a highly coordinated way, while male cells operate more independently. This synchronization, driven by sex hormones, helps explain why wounds heal faster in female mice, especially during the first few days.
Handy Youth Develop Smart Fidget Device to Support Mental Health Awareness, Win National Innovation Award - Florida Hospital News and Healthcare Report
Handy Fidgibeat team South Florida teens develop Fidgibeat, a prototype that combines fidgeting with real-time heart rate and usage tracking to help inform conversations about stress and emotional well-being October […]
Google Health: Evolving so you can focus on living better
What’s new from Google Health: Explore the new Fitbit Edge, expanded workout tracking, and dedicated women's health insights.
Garmin's New Smartwatch Has Battery Life That Laps the Apple Watch Ultra 4
The Garmin Enduro 4 promises up to 320 hours of battery while still offering the health and fitness tracking features of the Fenix 9 Pro.
Biden-era FBI’s ‘Nixonian’ Trump family surveillance draws scrutiny from unlikely corner
Julian Epstein, a former top Democratic official, compared the FBI's tracking of Melania Trump, Barron Trump and Susie Wiles to Nixonian tactics.
Google Launches Women’s Health Partnership and New Fitbit
Google has launched a women’s health partnership as it deepens its footprint in the wearable fitness-tracking space. The tech giant on Monday (Oct. 12)
Allina to pay $12.5M to settle federal data breach case
Case involves tracking pixels that shared some private patient information with third parties, like Google Analytics.
The Googlebook era is here: some first impressions of the hardware and a whole new OS
Today is the day. After months of tracking code commits, dissecting leaks, and getting that unforgettable first taste at Google’s media showcase in New York City, Googlebooks are officially landing...
Episcopal Health Foundation Launches Interactive Texas Health Tracking Poll
EHF’s new interactive Texas Health Tracking Poll website brings together eight years of statewide polling data conducted by SSRS. Results can be viewed across different populations, regions, income levels, health insurance coverage, and other factors to help better understand who faces barriers and how those challenges overlap.
Newcastle join Juventus and Roma in race for Sporting’s Doumbia
Newcastle have joined Juventus and Roma in tracking Sporting midfielder Issa Doumbia, just months after his move to Portugal.As noted by Tuttomercatoweb, A Bola splashed the story across its front pag...
Chelsea leading race to sign Alex Scott
Chelsea are at the front of the queue of clubs tracking England’s Alex Scott.
Tracking tsunamis triggered by extreme weather
As much of Western Europe faced record-breaking temperatures and extended drought this summer, Croatia experienced another weather event that could also set a worrisome precedent.Over the course of two weeks, a series of meteorological tsunamis (meteotsunamis) struck Croatia’s Adriatic coast, alarming both residents and tourists. Social media posts showed flooded seaside promenades and people walking through knee-deep water. Fortunately, no deaths or major damage were reported.In a world where natural disasters seem to be increasing, meteotsunamis — tsunamis caused by rapid weather changes – rarely make headline news. But warming sea temperatures and changing atmospheric conditions may help explain why these phenomena could become more common, especially in shallower seas and inland lakes with wide coastal shelves.“We have definitely become more aware of them, and there have been a lot more reports of these events in the last 10 years,” says Jadranka Šepić, an associate professor of environmental physics at the University of Split whose research focuses on efforts to track meteotsunamis in real time. She is also one of Croatia’s ambassadors for Science Comes to Town (SCTT), a European Commission-funded programme aimed at making research more accessible to the public.Šepić sees two possible reasons for the apparent increase in meteotsunamis. One is that photos and videos shared on social media are providing more empirical evidence, while rising air and sea temperatures could also play a role. The geophysicist “cannot say with certainty” that warming is a contributing factor because research is still ongoing. “But I can say that previously in Croatia we might have had one exceptionally strong event every 10 or 15 years, and one strong event every five years, and within 15 days this summer we had five strong events,” Šepić notes. “This is not typical.”‘A fist against the sea surface’Unlike tsunamis that are triggered by underwater earthquakes or volcanoes, meteotsunamis are caused by sudden changes in atmospheric pressure combined with other rapidly developing weather events, such as thunderstorms. The effect “is like pushing a fist against the sea surface,” Šepić explains. The resulting oscillation intensifies as it reaches shallower water, and “can be far more destructive than a wind-driven wave because meteotsunamis are accompanied by very strong currents than can penetrate much deeper inland.” The meteotsunami, she continues, “then behaves the same as a tsunami — they slow down and grow as the sea shallows, and then grow further in places like harbours due to further shallowing and narrowing. When they come ashore, they can be very destructive — taking everything with them out to sea and then taking it back.”Croatian research institutions have tracked such sea oscillations since the 1930s because the relatively shallow Adriatic Sea is prone to meteotsunamis. The strongest recorded so far was in June 1978, according to the Adriatic Meteotsunami Catalogue, which is supported by the European Research Council (ERC), Croatian Science Foundation and the country’s leading research institutions. During that event, six-metre-high waves flooded the coastal town of Vela Luka on Korčula Island, causing major damage.Other meteotsunami “hotspots” in Europe include the Mediterranean Sea as well the Atlantic coastal shelves off France, Portugal and Spain. In June 2006, a meteotsunami with five-metre-high waves swept through the harbour of Ciutadella in Spain’s Balearic Islands, causing widespread damage to boats. Several less powerful events were reported in the Balearics and off the coast of Spain this summer, leading to some beach closures.Forecasting is challenging because of how quickly meteotsunamis can develop and their uncertain trajectory. Šepić is involved in two ERC-funded research projects — SHExtreme and MeD-Track — aimed in part at strengthening monitoring and real-time data collection. Access to accurate and immediate information is essential for early-warning systems.Early exposure to meteotsunamisŠepić first learned about meteotsunamis from her parents while growing up in Croatia. She later had the opportunity to investigate these events during her master and doctoral studies in geophysics at the University of Zagreb. The geophysicist has also conducted research at the Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries in Split, the University of the Balearic Islands in Palma de Mallorca and the Institute of Ocean Science in the Canadian province of British Columbia.Projects like SCTT are important to raise awareness about research and inspiring young people to pursue studies and careers in science, notes Šepić. She credits her colleagues at the University of Split and the Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries for their community outreach and engagement in the European project, which includes partner universities and institutions in Brest (France) and Kiel (Germany). As an example of town-gown collaboration, Šepić highlights her own university’s ‘Oceanographers on the Island’ programme. This initiative offers workshops and hands-on learning for children living on numerous Croatian islands.“It is a great privilege for Split to be involved in a project like Science Comes to Town, which is the first of its kind in the European Union," Šepić says. As for encouraging new generations of scientists, “This is a great effort, and I hope that we will see an effect in a few years.”Science|Business, which connects policymakers, academics and industry through its news reporting, analysis and events, is an SCTT partner.
Higher daily step counts linked to fewer mental health problems in early adolescence
Every extra walk to school, casual soccer game in the park or trip to the store could be doing more for teenage mental health than first thought, according to new research tracking thousands of adolescents ...
Apple's Entire Mac Lineup Gets Massive Discounts for Prime Day
Prime Big Deal Days is in full swing, and we've already begun tracking the best Apple discounts during Amazon's big fall event. This year, there are notable markdowns across Apple's Mac lineup, including the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and brand new Mac mini and Mac Studio. MacBook Air Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.
We Found the 145 Best Prime Day Tech Deals From Apple, Dell, HP, Samsung, Sony, and More
Amazon's Big Deal Days is happening right now, and here at PCMag Deals, we're tracking down the very best tech deals on top-rated products with the deepest discounts just for you.
Opinion: How politics and policy are rewriting the rules of parcel delivery
By Daniil DavydoffFollowing the U.S. parcel delivery market can feel like tracking a race. Tactical moves to increase network capacity, build facilities,
Google Expands Automatic Activity Tracking And Brings Health Guardian To The Fitbit Air
The company announced new health features for its wearables along with a new band for the Fitbit Air.
Is Universal Health Services (UHS) Fairly Valued Or Is More Upside Left?
Universal Health Services: Stock Performance Snapshot With no single headline event driving trading, Universal Health Services (UHS) has been moving on recent performance data, including a last close of US$185.10 and mixed short and longer term returns. Over the past week the share price gained 4.4%. The move builds on a gain of 4.8% over the past month and 22.9% over the past 3 months, set against a year to date decline of 15.8%. For investors tracking the bigger picture, Universal Health...
How at-home health tracking is evolving beyond steps, sleep and screen time
Quest Health offers lab testing, including at-home options, for a variety of health conditions and markers. Heart health tests are currently 20% off.
Oura adds two new cardiovascular health tracking features to its smart rings
Oura’s recent smart rings are getting better at tracking cardiovascular performance.
Sundar Pichai: Google’s Frontier Imperative, Compute Scarcity Dilemmas, Future AI Products and Businesses
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has little patience for doubts about Google’s willingness or capacity to compete at the frontier of AI. His company’s latest Gemini 4 Argon model — long-promised and recently delivered — beats OpenAI and Anthropic’s latest public models on coding, math, science, and knowledge-work benchmarks and has placed Google’s AI back among the world’s best. Amid chatter that Google was fine with good-enough lightweight ‘Flash’ models, Pichai pushed back hard against any suggestion that company is limiting its research ambitions. “We won’t do it any other way,” he told me in a Big Technology Podcast interview recorded this week at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. Pursuing cutting-edge research is costly for Google, requiring compute and chips that otherwise could be sold at a high markup by its cloud business. But Pichai said allocating resources to frontier AI development is “ground zero” for Google. “Our cloud business is at any given moment in time forgoing short-term revenues because we are making compute trade-offs to support frontier AI development,” Pichai told me. In our conversation, we discussed Argon (which Pichai says processed three times as many tokens as Gemini 3 in the 72 hours after launch), AI’s role in developing better models, the AI interface of the future, competition with OpenAI, Google’s partnerships with Anthropic and Apple, data centers in space, and the nature of his optimism. You can read the full conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, below, or listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice. Alex Kantrowitz: Google is back at the frontier with Gemini 4 Argon, which beats OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s public models on benchmarks spanning coding, math, science, and knowledge work. The conventional wisdom was that Google had given up on the frontier to focus on fast, good-enough models for its products. That was wrong? Sundar Pichai: Very wrong. Look, we are so committed to being at the frontier. It’s in our DNA. We won’t do it any other way. We’ve been thinking about the AI frontier for well over a decade now. The frontier is very dynamic. It’s very competitive. It’s very exciting. I couldn’t be more pleased with how Argon has come together. We took our time with it. We made sure we tested it safely and deployed it carefully. We took a bit longer than our other models, given its capabilities. Across the board, be it for agentic work, knowledge work, coding, creative tasks, Argon is one of the really good frontier models. The first 72 hours since we launched, it’s almost up to 25 trillion tokens used, which is about three times what Gemini 3.0 had in the first 72 hours. And we are capacity constrained as we are serving it. Excited, but there are always areas….. You know, the frontier is very dynamic, and you have to keep evolving the models. There are areas which we can see we need to improve as well. We’ll be at work on all of that as well. Which areas? On any given model, Argon would be across the board better at everything if you just look even two months back. But the space is so evolving. Even on coding, for example, there are pockets where we know we need to do better, and there’s clear feedback. We’ll make it better. The argument for standard models is that they’re already good enough to build great products, with the frontier valuable only for certain tasks. Meta built Muse with good models rather than the best, and Google could put standard models into Maps, Gmail, and Search. Why isn’t that sufficient? It’s definitely not how I have thought about it at all. We are deeply committed to driving the state of the art and actually pushing where this technology can go, all the way from transformers. That’s a journey we’ve been on. You will see us continue to do that. When you’re at the frontier, you get an earlier look into the emerging capabilities, earlier than others, which helps you better prepare for the future. We are fortunate to have a wide set of opportunities across consumer and enterprise. Some of our cloud customers, for sure, want the model at the frontier. The frontier models will be better at developing the next set of models in an era of recursive self-improvement. I would argue it matters there. Internally, we have definitely seen a steep point of inflection by deploying Argon to our developers. It definitely tackles problems which our previous models could not do. Being at the frontier puts you at the innovation frontier and helps you drive that as well. There is room for models of all sizes and capabilities. That’s why we did Flash, Flash-Lite, etc. I agree with you that you can develop very good product experiences with not necessarily the most frontier model, because they tend to be slower and more expensive too. But we care about the Pareto frontier, and we’re committed to doing all of that. You said developing frontier models gives you a look at what’s coming. What do you see on the horizon? What makes this moment so exciting is you build something which you think is a culmination of months of work, and you put it out. You already see clear headroom ahead. We’ve all been working on these agentic, long-horizon capabilities, but clearly the frontier is going to have multiple of these agents working together to do things. That’s an example of an exciting paradigm underway. It’s also clear to me that users, both in consumer and enterprise, will have access to some multi-agent framework for them, working all the time doing things. It feels like a moment of infinite possibilities. Sergey Brin said one of Argon’s core innovations was relying more on the model to help develop the model. Yet incidents involving OpenAI’s bots breaking containment and Google’s bots accessing a site they shouldn’t have suggest these systems still aren’t perfectly aligned. Isn’t there reasonable cause for concern about accelerating toward recursive self-improvement? There are three parts to your question. Let’s first talk about RSI itself. You’re right, Sergey mentioned RSI being a critical contributor as we are developing Argon. But to be very clear, today, in a continuum, we are pretty far from the end state of RSI or something like that. The right way to describe it is you have RSI loops along with AI researchers in various aspects of model development. You almost have agents helping AI researchers in some automated way work together to build these models. It’s good to at least understand where we are today, and it’s super exciting. I expect that continuum to keep making progress as we go into next year. The second question is around safety. Security comes from defense in depth. You’re talking about alignment, obviously. We all are doing a lot of work to make sure the models are as aligned as possible. But it’s an active area of research, and there are clear gaps. That’s not the only thing we rely on. You have the work you do on alignment, but beyond that, we put a lot of effort into real-time monitoring as these models are working. Making sure you have good telemetry into what’s happening so that you can intervene in real time if you see unexpected behaviors. How you do that, the architecture with which you do that, how you make sure it’s all sandboxed and isolated in a way that it can continue doing its job during real-time monitoring — these are all areas of investment. Obviously, when we deploy these models, giving customers, enterprises, control, both with real-time monitoring, but their ability to decide where they deploy, what type of data which models ever have access to, etc. All that work is very, very important, and we are doing a lot of that. As an industry, we need to constantly up our game and take the time to do all this stuff, including dedicating the compute required to make sure you can safely deploy these models. The third part is: Is it all enough? This is why there are a lot of conversations in the industry, and I think it’s reasonable to be worried. The right way to approach something you worry about is early on thinking about what more we can do. As an industry, you’re definitely seeing increased levels of work on alignment, testing for safety, etc., as we deploy these models. The next step would be developing better standards so there are cross-industry standards of how we do these things, including the ability to evaluate using independent evaluators. If you look at areas like financial controls, we have accounting standards, we have independent auditors. Those are all the next natural steps for us as an industry to work toward, and regulation will end up playing a role as we go through all of that as well. Google pursues both language models and world models, while some other AI companies like OpenAI have focused more heavily on LLMs as the path to AGI. Why is world-model research important to you? As humans, you obviously perceive the world around you, and you’re taking all those inputs. Making sure these models are able to understand the laws of physics, simulate the world in high fidelity. All that, I think, are key enabling blocks for intelligence. We are working across all possible applications of this. Take an area like robotics. It’s not an accident: If you look at embodied reasoning benchmarks, Argon is state of the art. That all comes from our experience building world models. Inherently, I would expect there will be architectures which will converge all of this in the future. But for us, we view this as, today, this jagged frontier that is intelligence. We want to be at the frontier of all the possible approaches, and that will help us both drive better research, better insights, and develop a much better AGI model, is how we think about it. Some people argue Google should focus on selling its computing resources rather than using them for AI research. Cloud wants to sell compute at a high markup, while researchers need a very big computer to build the best models. How do you balance those demands? Ground zero for us is making sure we are investing in the compute that’s needed to be at the AI frontier. In 2015, I set the company to be AI-first. AI is that key horizontal ingredient across everything we do, all the way from Search to Cloud to Waymo. That is ground zero for us, making sure both for research and developing the models that we have enough compute needed. Beyond that, we have these independent businesses which each have their own long-range plans. They’re using those long-range plans to project forward, and we plan for compute for all of them. The cloud team, they have a business and they have a projection and they have demand signals. They have committed contracts. With that help, we can plan on a long-term compute trajectory for them. We’re fortunate to have this wide set of opportunities. There’s no company in the world which isn’t making trade-offs at any given moment in time. But the first principles we operate on is making sure we have enough compute to invest in the frontier, and that’s non-negotiable, and everything else works on top. Remember, we are building our own compute, our own data centers. There are long lead times. The compute we have today is a function of decisions I made in 2024. Even if you think back to a year from today, last year the agentic coding takeoff hadn’t happened. Today, obviously, when you sit and look at anything, everyone is short—not just us, other companies—and everyone wishes you had two times what you had planned for. That comes with the territory. At any given moment in time, we are planning for what we would need two to three years out in the future. You’re going to find some decisions you make may look suboptimal two years out, depending on where the state of the art is. I don’t spend too much time thinking about it. The way I think about compute allocation is making sure Google DeepMind, both for research and frontier model development, is cutting edge in terms of compute access. After that, we plan for all our businesses. It’s great we can provide our compute to other people too, like we have done. It allows us to scale that up, get real tests for it in the widest application set possible, test it in the real world, and make sure we are at the cutting edge of technology at every layer of our AI stack as well. Ben Horowitz relayed on a podcast that Andy Jassy had said compute was sold out until 2028. Are you seeing the same thing? If today a customer is coming out and asking us for compute in ’27, that is incredibly difficult to do. Even last year we went out and leased some short-term compute to accommodate some customers and help them out. But yes, we are all dealing with similar timelines. Every major technology shift seems to involve overbuilding, from railroads to fiber. Do you think that’s happening here? It depends on the time frames you’re looking at. This level of build, if I take a long enough time frame, it makes complete sense to me. We are at early stages of the most consequential technology ever, and this is not like fiber. It’s not dark. We are using it. We are capacity constrained on a daily basis. The applications, the underlying technology is improving rapidly. But running a company, the way I work through the moment is you look at your demand signals. You look at your committed revenue opportunities that you’re getting in the form of contracts. You balance that with the underlying technical capability, or internally you balance how we are using it internally, the model trajectories. Based on all that, you take a disciplined approach—a confident, aggressive, but disciplined approach—to plan out compute. But when you talk about the broader economy as a whole, you’re having people operate with various levels of risk. I focus on what I can control as a company and plan through it. If your question is, can there be an overbuild? Yes, because you can have some constrained components. Remember, what matters is a set of everything you need to build out that compute. Memory, electricity, electricians…. Land. Like 2,000 components or more. You could get constrained at some point. There could be things which cause bottlenecks, and then you could have overbuilds. There could be external shocks to the economy. There are macro risks. All that is possible at any given time. But am I confident that the compute we are planning for, we will have uses for it given enough time? Absolutely, yes. I was in the room when you said AI would be as profound as fire and electricity. If you believe that, shouldn’t you give researchers the biggest possible computer, even at the expense of today’s cloud profits? We’re all doing some form of that. Our cloud business is at any given moment in time forgoing short-term revenues because we are making compute trade-offs to support frontier AI development. What you’re seeing is true already. But you want to be thoughtful. Even our AI researchers have some constraints, which are also good. That’s what inspires creativity. That’s what helps you come up with a more efficient algorithmic breakthrough, maybe to use less memory. What we are committed to is to invest what’s needed to stay at the frontier. OpenAI President Greg Brockman told me a few months ago that the ideal AI product might have no interface at all—just as natural as conversation. What do you think the interface looks like in the age of AI? Computing historically has been humans adapting to computing. With AI, it’ll be the other way around. The technology will adapt seamlessly to how humans live and go about their day-to-day life. You want to be able to speak to that AI when you want to. It has context. It can be persistently running somewhere, give you continuity. You’re not dealing with a lot of complexity. It’s natural. All that makes sense to me. That doesn’t mean it won’t have any interface, however. Nowadays, even on my phone, Gemini voice models are so good. I can just press the microphone button. I can just ramble. That’s why we call it Rambler. I can ramble. It intelligently corrects with my personal context. Even my friends’ names, weird names, it gets it right, even if it first guesses it wrong. It’s amazing. I’m not going in, backspacing, editing once I finish saying it. It’s remarkable how good it’s gotten. But there are going to be moments you will need an interface. You may want to entertain yourself. You may want to watch a video. You may ask your AI to create something, and you want to watch it, consume it. The way I think about it is, you want it to be as seamless and as natural as possible, and that you are not doing the hard work adapting to whatever the interface is. The technology is adapting to how you’re working at any given moment in time. When I asked Sam Altman about competition from Google, he argued that OpenAI was building AI-native products and implied Google was bolting AI onto existing ones. Do you accept that framing, and can a “bolt-on” compete with an AI-native product? First of all, it’s a very dynamic moment. We are all pushing each other. OpenAI has pushed us as a company too. This is not just we are doing something to them. Far from it. Yes, Google went into its own version of a code red too. In the AI moment, all of us have to respond with varying levels of urgency at any given moment in time. We are constantly building new products as well. Gemini was built from the ground up as a product—the Gemini app I’m talking about. Or tomorrow, as all of us are adapting to agents, are you bolting agents onto ChatGPT, or are they building it natively? How would you think about that? You can always put these questions back. I don’t think of it that way. I think of it as you want to build world-class product experiences that are AI-native and they are winning. Some of it is adapting products, some of it is rethinking new experiences. They will all be part of how you approach this moment. How do you expect to make money from these AI interfaces? If an agent recommends a product and I buy it, should it take a cut of the sale, even if that’s disclosed? I’m going to put enterprise aside. Consumers are going to increasingly value this technology. Take software developers today. Developers are willing to pay for these coding models because it really helps make them more productive. Nobody would want to code the way they were coding three years ago, or even the same time last year. When you’re delivering value, there’s value to be had. I’ve never seen examples where consumer products really scale to billions of users, where people are using it intensely, and haven’t had monetization to go along with it. If you’re providing value to people, there is inherent value to be had. The nature of it may change. You’re asking a scenario in which agents are doing stuff for you. At the end of the day, you will have commercial needs. The agents need to fulfill those commercial needs. The providers on the other side are going to see value in that. There’s going to be some mechanism by which it gets fleshed out. That’s what an efficient system does. But what matters is that you’re building those world-class consumer experiences. I promised myself one product feature request: Can you make Gemini-powered search in Gmail as good as searching Gmail through ChatGPT? What’s going on here? One of the exciting things we announced recently is the unified Gemini agent for enterprise, and we’re bringing that to consumers. These are persistent agents which run 24/7 in the cloud. We’re spinning up a micro VM effectively for every query, and from the runtime, the harness, the model—it’s all a headless service. It’ll work everywhere, and it has your context with you. You can address this agent whether you’re in Workspace, in Search, in Gemini. Agents are going to drive this unification from a customer experience, which people are looking for. When you have a broad product portfolio and you’re moving forward fast, there are always areas where you’re moving forward faster than some other areas. That’s valid feedback. But we are putting a lot of time and effort into making sure, as we build out our agentic experience, that unification and that capability works well across all these services. People have asked where Google’s equivalent of Muse or Dots is. Do you anticipate creating a new product to compete with them? Our goal with Gemini is to be a personal, proactive, and powerful assistant. That’s what we are working toward. You saw us describe the early versions of it at Google I/O this year with Spark. Effectively, already, if you open the Gemini app as a Pro or an Ultra user, you see Chat and Task, and they start giving you that agentic experience. With Argon now, that capability is dramatically accelerated. What we announced recently in our enterprise event, we are bringing that to consumers as well. Soon in Gemini, you will be able to ask something, and it’s a continuum. You don’t need to think about whether you’re asking a chat or an agentic task. It’ll just automatically do the right thing, and it can work persistently in the background securely and get things done for you. Already, empirically, when I look at what’s coming into Gemini in our app, last year you would have tagged them and most of them would have been chats. But a steadily growing percentage is already agentic tasks in Gemini. Yes, we are going to bring personal agents to our consumers. It’ll work in the Gemini app. It’ll work in Google Search. It’ll work in Gmail. You can address it, call it, etc. We want to make sure we’re getting it right. It’ll be powered by Argon, and we are very excited to bring it to our users. Google has invested and committed tens of billions of dollars to Anthropic. What do you see in Dario Amodei that makes you want such a deep investment and partnership? Very early on, when we looked at the founding team of Anthropic, it was very clear to us this was a world-class team which was involved in some of the earliest GPT models. We were quickly able to assess that they would be at the frontier. We’ve always tried to identify and partner with companies which would be at the cutting edge of technology. We’ve done that with SpaceX. We’ve done that with Anthropic. That’s what we saw, and we had a chance to partner. Is your partnership with Apple to license Gemini for Siri expanding, contracting, or standing still? For both us and Apple, that partnership was about translating the capabilities of AI into better experiences for users. I thought Apple has done a phenomenal job of incorporating—they customize these models and build it into Siri—and it’s been great to see the reception. We are committed to doing more. You’re going to do more with them? There’s nothing specific to comment, but it’s a partnership. It’s working well. What have you learned so far about the feasibility of data centers in space? It’s a very exciting project. Projects like this remind me—I still recall that moment in the desert for the DARPA Grand Challenge, watching the Stanley car compete in it, which ended up being the basis for Waymo. With all these technologies, you’re at a moment in time where it looks a bit like sci-fi, but 10 to 20 years down the line, it’s actually working in a meaningful way. I feel the same in space. We’ve always believed in betting big on these technologies. Quantum has been a great example of it. We’re probably 10 years into the journey. Waymo, we are almost 20 years into the journey. Space, we are two to three years into the journey. It’s clear to me that it’s an approach which will make a lot of sense in the future. Being in sub-synchronous orbits with 24/7 access to the most abundant form of energy we have access to will make a lot of sense for this exponential increase in compute that we are going to need. Having said that, this is a challenging project. The team has disciplined milestones. It was a super exciting milestone to send the TPUs up to space. Sometime, as we are speaking, we are expecting a “hello world” moment from them. I look forward to seeing that happen, and we’ll continue investing here too. You previously said 25% of the code written within Google was written by AI. What’s the number today? That number in our world today is meaningless in the sense that every part of what we now touch is influenced by AI deeply. What we are tracking with Argon, for example, it’s been a point of inflection. People are using Argon to really go tackle complex projects, including projects which affect millions of lines of code. In the four weeks since we have launched Argon, we have seen a 30% increase in CLs, and more importantly, almost a similar increase—a one-third decrease in rollbacks. People are writing code more productively and better code with it. We are tracking it with newer metrics now. How are you dealing with opposition to data centers? If you can’t build in the U.S. the way you want to, where else do you go? We’re very committed to building our data centers very responsibly. When I look at our largest data centers in some of the communities where we have been the longest, I visit them, I talk to people. There are people who come and tell us their kids have gone to college because of our investments in these communities, and we’ve grown in those communities. To me, this is about doing it right. Engaging with the communities early, doing it transparently. We are committed to making sure we are bringing incremental power, and we cover 100% of the cost of our power needs for these projects. It’s understanding the impact on neighborhoods and making sure you’re working thoroughly to address them. Done rightly, you can continue making progress. But we are constantly taking feedback into account. I do worry not everyone operates the same way. People have been surprised by data centers showing up in their backyard. Those are all important. As an industry, we should continue to do better. But part of the reason, in a 20-year time frame, we are thinking about things like data centers in space is making sure we are able to put these data centers where maybe the trade-offs will be different. What unproven area of AI is Google working hardest to crack? Is it continual learning—getting models to keep updating after release—or something else? There are multiple parallel paths. You saw with Argon we have a million output tokens. With our Gemini models early on, we had a one-million context window on the input side. These are all examples of breakthroughs we are constantly working on. How do you think about synthetic data? How do you think about continual learning? How do you think about more efficient architectures? We do dedicate a meaningful percentage of our compute to these research bets too. It always goes hand in hand, including our world models. Those are all bets we are placing. Sometimes, as part of these bets, there are ideas that emerge which just make their way into the mainline models. Maybe we don’t fully talk about it, but we have multiple steps in these areas. Working in technology requires optimism that building something will improve the world, but those bets can leave real consequences when they fail. I recently returned to a town in El Salvador where enthusiasm for Bitcoin had given way to unfinished construction and something resembling a ghost town. How do you maintain the optimism you spoke about in your Stanford commencement address while accounting for those risks? I genuinely have a deep conviction that improving technology and improving access to technology makes people’s lives better. It’s been my personal experience in my life, out of which comes that deep conviction, optimism. But with that, I’ve always felt humanity’s journey is always about working hard to harness that technology to make it work well for society. The optimism is not an optimism that you just build whatever you want, whenever. You work hard to make sure you’re building technology in the service of humanity, to make the human condition better. That’s got to be the defining goal as we are approaching it. With that framework, I’m very, very optimistic. We are in very early stages of the kind of progress that we are going to see on many areas. We’re all talking about areas like healthcare. A lot of the progress is ahead. The ability to make things in a fundamentally cheaper way on many things where things have been getting expensive for a long, long time, discovering new materials, etc., which really bend the curve—it’s tough to step today and understand the impact of all that, but they’re going to be very profound. I’m very optimistic, but we have to be rightfully concerned about all the ways this technology can go wrong. Sundar, I know you don’t do many of these. Thank you. Thanks, Alex. Appreciate it.
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Navigating the American Dream: How Integrated Financial Tools, Credit and Rewards Can Help Small Businesses Succeed
(Feature Impact) Owning a small business has been a cornerstone of the “American Dream” for generations. It represents the chance to transform a passion into a livelihood and legacy. However, turning dreams into reality is rarely a smooth or easy process and requires more than ambition alone. Today’s business owners need support and access to tools that enable them to overcome challenges and keep growing.#placement_678081_0_i{width:100%;margin:0 auto;}var rnd = window.rnd || Math.floor(Math.random()*10e6);var pid678081 = window.pid678081 || rnd;var plc678081 = window.plc678081 || 0;var abkw = window.abkw || '';var absrc = 'https://ads.empowerlocal.co/adserve/;ID=181918;size=0x0;setID=678081;type=js;sw='+screen.width+';sh='+screen.height+';spr='+window.devicePixelRatio+';kw='+abkw+';pid='+pid678081+';place='+(plc678081++)+';rnd='+rnd+';click=CLICK_MACRO_PLACEHOLDER';var _absrc = absrc.split("type=js"); absrc = _absrc[0] + 'type=js;referrer=' + encodeURIComponent(document.location.href) + _absrc[1];document.write('');Recent research conducted by the Capital One Insights Center shows 75% of more than 1,000 surveyed small business owners with more than one employee and annual revenues of up to $20 million are confident about the future, and 69% believe their business is actively primed for growth.While this optimism is promising, 47% of business owners still said their operations either stayed the same or became less efficient over the past year, citing issues like back-office friction and fragmented financial systems that make it difficult to get a clear picture of the health of their businesses.If you’re a small business owner eager to grow but not sure how to get there, start with this advice from real small business owners and experts at Capital One.Identify Sources of FrictionBefore you can pour effort into growth, you must understand what barriers are holding you back. Take time to look under the hood of your business to identify where time and energy is being lost.For example, you may be among the 78% of small business owners who feel stressed and uncertain about expense management – think hours spent hunting for receipts, manually entering numbers into software and reconciling accounts. Operational challenges aren’t just a hassle; they also pull attention away from important priorities like serving your customers and planning for growth. “We were focused on making as many candles as possible, especially during the busy season,” said Katie Roering, co-owner of Fontana Candle Co. “A lot of the back-office tasks like procurement, raw material purchasing, forecasting – all the really important things – were done at 3 a.m., 8 p.m. or on Saturday and Sunday, and there really just was not enough time in the day to get everything done that we needed to. We just knew as we continued to grow, we needed to streamline our processes, build out our team and keep moving forward.”Use Integrated Tools to Manage FinancesInstead of balancing 10 different tracking and analysis tools, you can turn to one-stop solutions to improve efficiency. Time gets lost when you’re forced to manually gather and interpret relevant data before you’re able to act. You need a platform that handles the busywork for you.Integrated, or “all-in-one,” financial tools – like accounting and bookkeeping platforms with automation capabilities or business credit cards featuring built-in analytical tools – allow you to easily stay on top of cash flow and day-to-day operations. For small businesses where every hour and dollar makes a difference, consolidating and automating systems can have an immediate impact. In fact, 51% of survey respondents said integrated tools have already fueled their growth.Leverage Credit Access and Rewards WiselyGrowth requires capital, so access to credit is a game-changer for many business owners, with 77% describing it as a key factor in achieving business resilience. Having funds accessible when you need them makes your business more capable of weathering storms such as equipment failures and seasonal slowdowns. It also puts the power in your hands to act when an exciting opportunity presents itself, like an inventory flash sale or the chance to advertise in a new market.Access to credit comes with another advantage: rewards. By using credit cards for your daily business expenses, you can earn cash back, points or travel rewards. Whether you redeem these to cover everyday expenses, book business trips or reinvest in the business, they can act as a bonus source of income. Learn to maximize rewards like the 84% of small business cardholders surveyed so you aren’t leaving money on the table.To learn more about how small business owners can identify obstacles, employ integrated financial tools and use credit as a tool for growth, read the full report at capitalone.com/about/insights-center.Photos courtesy of Shutterstock
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DNA left on a painting cover has helped investigators recover two stolen Renoirs and uncover plans for another heist, according to a French prosecutor.
Flo Health and Google Health Join Forces to Put Women's Health at the Center of Wearable Tracking and Personalized Coaching
/PRNewswire/ -- Flo Health, the #1 women's health platform worldwide, announces today a multi-year strategic partnership with Google Health to create a more...
Can AI solve our mental health access problem?
Last week I asked you what worries you most about AI in health. It was close, but your top answer was “AI giving bad health advice.” Last week’s poll results: You’re in good company. This concern was top of mind at a conference I joined at Stanford last week, where researchers, clinicians, and people who build AI systems spent a day debating trust and safety in health AI. Stepping back, I’m also hearing your emerging concerns about AI’s impact on our well-being generally. I see this as a matter of public health, and we’ll take it in pieces as we learn together. Today we’ll focus on AI chatbots used for therapy for mental health. Early this month, Governor Newsom vetoed Senate Bill 903, California’s most ambitious attempt to regulate AI use for mental health. It’s at the center of active debate, and raises the questions patients, family members, citizens, and voters will face as AI moves deeper into health care. Let’s work through it. What is “AI-based therapy”? It’s really two things: purpose-built mental health apps designed to deliver structured support, and general chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini that people increasingly use for emotional support—even if they weren’t built for it. Spoiler alert: I don’t know whether the shift toward AI therapy is good or bad. The evidence isn’t there yet. But I do know it’s already happening, and I have some ideas about how we can roll it out with safety in mind. The therapy dilemma, in a nutshell Mental health challenges are common, and strain health and well-being across populations. Therapy (interactive dialogue with a trained, empathetic practitioner) helps many people heal. The demand for licensed therapists far exceeds the supply in California, and AI-based therapy can narrow that gap. AI-based therapy remains novel, unproven, and not well tested. Right off the bat, we can see we’re dealing with trade-offs here. Since the main driver of demand for therapy from a robot is lack of access to therapy from a human, we’ll start there. It’s too hard to find and afford a human therapist California is short roughly 55,000 licensed, non-prescribing therapists and counselors, about 40% of what we need. Psychiatrists, who rely on talk therapy as a complement to prescribed medications, are even more scarce. Eight counties have none, and density ranges from 1.7 per 100,000 residents in San Benito County, to 68.1 in Marin County. My wife is a psychiatrist in Marin, and even here access is tight. If it’s hard in the best-supplied county, imagine rural Sierra County, or the San Joaquin Valley. In 2024, more than half of Californians who tried to make a mental health appointment struggled to find a provider who took their insurance, compared with 14% for physical health care. When Senate staff posed as “secret shopper” patients and called 120 mental health providers in Medicare Advantage networks, they landed an appointment less than once for every five tries. Insurers pay behavioral health clinicians about 22% less than medical and surgical clinicians for comparable office visits. On top of that, billing denials and prior authorizations hit hardest at the solo and small practices common in mental health. Psychiatrists opt out of Medicare at the highest rate of any specialty. In many places, a cash practice for therapy fills quickly with patients paying $250 or more an hour, with no insurance paperwork at all. Families who can pay cash find providers more easily. Those who rely on insurance, including Medi-Cal enrollees, older adults, rural residents, and non-English speakers, compete for what’s left. So we can’t pretend the human system works, and we can’t blame people for turning to AI for support when they’re in distress. AI is filling the gap It’s estimated that roughly a quarter of AI users use it for mental health support. If you have internet, it’s available 24/7, it’s cheap, and it speaks your language. Uninsured adults are about twice as likely as insured adults to do it (30% vs. 14%). It feels anonymous in ways that may enable people to ask things they’re unsure or embarrassed about. The largely hidden, personal use makes it hard to study whether it’s actually helping people with their mental health issues, but researchers are trying. Does AI therapy work? A 2026 analysis of nearly 40 randomized trials found chatbots showed a real but small reduction in depression symptoms. But most of these trials were compared to an alternative of no therapy, not a human therapist. So the benefit of AI therapy is probably real, but modest, and mostly untested against the alternative of human contact. We need more studies. Serious concerns OpenAI’s own estimate is that more than a million ChatGPT users each week show signs of suicidal planning or intent. These are high stakes encounters, and AI doesn’t always get it right. That’s partly because a chatbot can sound like a therapist, but it has no license, no duty of care, and it’s not clear who to hold accountable when it gets things wrong. AI is also designed to help users in whatever task they’re seeking to accomplish. People may feel like they’re getting therapy, but they’re mainly getting a convincing conversation. It’s easy for an AI companion to wander into gray areas, like playing along with “creative writing” that may be about the user’s own suicidal intent. Courts are driving safety conversations A wave of lawsuits have been filed on behalf of families claiming that chatbots pushed people they loved toward self-harm, including teens who died by suicide. The first settlements came this year. OpenAI is headquartered in San Francisco, and dozens of cases alleging that ChatGPT drove users to suicide or self-harm are now before a San Francisco judge. Character.ai has filed for bankruptcy after several states brought lawsuits accusing the chatbot of pushing dangerous content to kids. But the technology seems to be improving. Last month, an independent evaluation found that newer AI models “almost never endorse suicide.” That’s progress, but our societal appetite for even one preventable death is very low. So how do we move forward? Finding a middle ground Earlier this month the governor vetoed Senate Bill 903, a bill designed to place guardrails on the use of AI for therapy. The bill would have prohibited any AI-based platform from being advertised as psychotherapy, and would have required a licensed professional to review and approve each encounter where AI was used to support therapeutic decisions. Newsom called it overly broad, since even routine screening questions would have needed clinician sign-off. Knowing we’re already short on mental health providers, requiring human review of AI encounters may not relieve our access problems. Still, the answer isn’t no oversight. Here’s one feasible short term solution. Rather than reviewing each encounter, a licensed clinician can design the guardrails: what counts as a crisis, what triggers an immediate handoff to a human, and what gets sampled for audit each month. The AI runs inside that structure. Conversations get checked, failures get reported, and a real clinician owns the framework. Medicine already has models to learn from. The FDA process for rolling out newly approved medications is an example. After a product reaches patients, we keep watching for adverse events. Patient-facing AI needs the same “digital pharmacovigilance”: systematic tracking of harms, near misses, and the types of groups that get hurt and why. It’s also critical that users know that they can reach a human if they’re in crisis. Most chatbots now include messages like these: Bottom line The rush to use unproven AI tools for mental health support is mostly a workaround, a sign of a health system people can’t get into. We need better access to proven care from licensed clinicians. That takes reimbursement that makes accepting insurance viable, and a bigger workforce. But, built and tested well, AI could be part of the answer. It could be the 2 a.m. check-in when no one else is awake, or a way for patients to practice skills their therapist taught them. It could be the first step to get someone the right level of care, and take paperwork off clinicians’ plates so they spend more time with patients. None of this is simple. The SB 903 veto doesn’t end the debate, and the legislature will be back. In the meantime, those of us using these tools need to stay informed, ask hard questions, and hold the companies building them accountable. I’ll try to do my part, and we’ll keep learning together. Love,Matt P.S. If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health challenges, emotional distress, substance use problems, or just needs to talk, call or text 988- you’ll reach a real person— or chat at 988lifeline.org 24/7. Dr. Matt Willis is the author of Your Local Epidemiologist in California. A California native, he’s served as a primary care physician, CDC epidemiologist, and public health officer for Marin County, where he guided the pandemic response. He lives in Marin with his family and their dogs, Teddy and Ramona. Thank you Cynthia He, MD, PhD, and Parnika Saxena, MD, for their guidance in preparing this article. Cynthia works in an outpatient mental health clinic, treating patients who have Medi-Cal or, sometimes, no insurance. Parnika works in an inpatient psychiatric unit, treating patients with public or private insurance or self-pay ability. All opinions are their own and do not represent their employers.
Menstrual tracking apps lack evidence of health and performance benefits
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Brookfield Business (TSX:BBUC) Rebound Hopes Meet A Fair Value Reality Check
Brookfield Business (TSX:BBUC) has been drawing attention after its share price closed at CA$35.96, with recent returns showing mixed momentum over the past week, month, and past 3 months for investors tracking the stock. For context, Brookfield Business is coming off a weak stretch, with the share price down 27.31% year to date and 15.15% over the past 3 months. However, the 3-year total shareholder return of 84.94% still points to a much stronger longer-term outcome than the recent pullback...
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Astronauts’ hearts just passed a surprising test for Mars
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We found the best Prime Day savings on MacBooks, Windows laptops and more based on years of extensive testing and price tracking.
Is Teladoc Health (TDOC) Cheap Following Its New AI Tools?
Teladoc Health (TDOC) just rolled out two AI tools inside its Solo platform, SoloVitals and SoloScribe, aimed at contactless vital sign tracking and streamlined clinical note taking for hospital and health system clients. Despite Teladoc Health unveiling AI tools aimed at making virtual visits smoother for hospitals, the 30-day share price return is down 10% and the 90-day move has fallen 41.24%. The 5-year total shareholder return has declined 95.88%, pointing to longer term momentum that...
Google’s Fitbit Air is getting a shiny new Metal Mesh band and better automatic tracking
The Fitbit Air is finally getting another band option that isn’t fabric or polyurethane. Instead, the Metal Mesh band might...
New framework aims to improve reliability of tear-based health sensors
Dr. Yangzhi Zhu of the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation (TIBI), with collaborators at UC San Diego and USC, published a Nature Sensors perspective on what it will take to turn tear-based wearable sensors into reliable, long-term health-tracking tools.
You Can Get Up to $149 Off Every New Mac Mini During Prime Day
Prime Big Deal Days sales have hit Apple's brand new Mac mini and Mac Studio computers, and we're tracking up to $149 off every model of the M6 and M5 Pro Mac mini during this year's event. You'll also find $199 off the M5 Max Mac Studio below. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.
KFF Health Tracking Poll: Health Care Issues in the Lead-Up to the 2026 Midterm Election
Affordability worries continue to top the public’s list of midterm election issues, with health care and gas costs tying as the top economic concern, finds KFF’s new Health Tracking Poll conducted on the SSRS Opinion Panel. Overall, voters trust Democrats more than Republicans to handle health care costs and the cost of living. A quarter...
DNA and vehicle-tracking help French investigators recover stolen Renoirs and makes arrests
DNA left on a painting cover has helped investigators recover two stolen Renoirs and uncover plans for another heist, according to a French prosecutor | WWJ Newsradio 950
Mayor Karen Bass fights for 2nd term against democratic socialist-backed Raman
Nearly three weeks into mail voting, only 5% of ballots have been returned, according to ballot tracking firm Political Data Inc.
About the Tennessee Business Against Tracking initiative
Six Rivers Media talked with Office of Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett's Director of Communications Ben Hill about the Tennessee Business Against Trafficking initiative.
Disney Believe Entertainment Guide: Shows, Characters & More.
What entertainment will be on the Disney Believe? We’re tracking all of the stage shows, character appearances, deck parties, kids clubs, and other entertainment coming to Disney Cruise Line’s newest ship. Disney Cruise Line’s newest ship, the Disney Believe, is preparing to set sail in late 2027. And while there’s still quite a bit Disney ...
Tencent Music Entertainment Group (NYSE:TME) Shifts To Hong Kong In Global Index Tracking
Tencent Music Entertainment Group (NYSE:TME) was added to the FTSE All-World Index through its SEHK listing while its NYSE line was removed. The index action shifts Tencent Music Entertainment Group’s inclusion from the US listing to its Hong Kong traded shares for benchmark purposes. This FTSE All-World rotation from NYSE to SEHK for Tencent Music Entertainment Group is one factor to weigh against the rest of our work. Check out 3 other big wins that Tencent Music Entertainment Group...
DNA and vehicle-tracking help French investigators recover stolen Renoirs and makes arrests
DNA left on a painting cover has helped investigators recover two stolen Renoirs and uncover plans for another heist, according to a French prosecutor | WBBM Newsradio 780 AM & 105.9 FM
Windber institute's data tracking system used by scientists far and wide
Developed by a member of the Chan Soon-Shiong Institute of Molecular Medicine at Windber, a system for using data to solve real-world problems caused by cancer is making a mark
Tracking Military Health Through the Millennium Cohort Study
Why it matters * Long-term evidence strengthens military health and readiness * Research turns service members' experiences into better care * Findings have informed policy, prevention and screeningNORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESS Newswire / October 20, 2026 / For more than three decades, has helped federal military leaders turn health questions into evidence that improves care and readiness. The Millennium Cohort Study shows that work in action, helping agencies better understand health challenges and
Douglas County flu cases rise 61% in a week, health department says
The Douglas County Health Department has started its weekly tracking of flu cases for the season, with early numbers showing an increase in cases.
Google unveils new Fitbit Edge tracker as tech giant expands health monitoring ambitions
Google on Monday its debuted its second Fitbit tracker of the year, the Fitbit Edge, which sits between the screenless health tracker Fitbit Air and the more advanced Pixel Watch. | The new device also builds on Google’s health tracking ambitions by combining advanced health sensors with AI-powered insights designed to identify changes in a user’s health and translate those signals into personalized guidance.
Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine: Tracking Outbreaks Amid Conflict
War recovery plans should include detailed monitoring to prevent diseases like polio and cholera from spreading
Smart ring maker Oura postpones public listing due to 'uncertainty in the IPO market'
The digital health IPO window may be closing, at least for now. | Smart ring maker and health tracking company Oura is postponing its previously announced initial public offering on Nasdaq due to "uncertainty in the IPO market," the company announced Tuesday morning.
Amazon Discounting 2026 MacBook Pro by as Much as $600 This Week
Today we're tracking a pair of massive discounts on Apple's newest MacBook Pro models, including $500 off a 16-inch model and $600 off a 14-inch model on Amazon. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running. The 15-Core M5 Pro 14-inch MacBook Pro with 24GB RAM and 2TB SSD has hit $2,399.00 on Amazon, down from $2,999.00.
PEN America: Nearly 12,000 school book bans in a year, a record high
A new study from PEN America reveals that there were nearly 12,000 book bans in public schools over the past year, the highest since tracking began five years ago | WBBM Newsradio 780 AM & 105.9 FM